


At Home in the Puddles

by gamefish



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Ficlet, Fluff, Found Families, Gen, Home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2017-12-20
Packaged: 2019-02-17 17:16:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13081545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gamefish/pseuds/gamefish
Summary: When your life doesn't go according to plan, sometimes it's okay. And sometimes it's better than okay.





	At Home in the Puddles

**Author's Note:**

> For Jess.
> 
> Beta'd by the Captain Wombat herself. Thank you :)

The house had happened by accident. When Enjolras pictured himself at 30, it was originally working as a speechwriter in a Warren White House. However, the rot of his country wasn’t decay, it was an iceberg that wasn’t melting anytime soon. Living in an America where the Lincoln logs had all been kicked over to reveal the teeming patriarchal white supremacist underbelly was not the plan. A new normal every day, while the world expected him to carry on with business as usual was not the plan. And so even if the house hadn’t been in the plan either, he couldn’t imagine coming home to an empty apartment every night, seeing his friends every other weekend if they were lucky. And honestly, he probably wouldn’t be eating as regularly either if all had gone to plan.

When his grandfather had died, Marius had been shocked to inherit the house. Enjolras had of course felt tempted to drop some hints about selling it in order to finance the ABC, but had thought better of it. Well, Grantaire had encouraged him to think better of it. Besides, apparently there was a stipulation in the will about that. Instead, Marius decided to move in and power steam out the old memories. At first, it was just Marius and Courfeyrac, but that left 5 empty bedrooms and that was too much silence for even Courf to fill. Enjolras had left his things in storage to go canvas in Alabama. When he got back, it made sense to move right in. And he and Grantaire hadn’t had an official Talk about moving in together, but talking was never their strength. Nor was long distance. Long distance meaning Chicago to Alabama...or Addison to Argyle on the Red Line. And so Grantaire came too, at first setting up shop in a room on the first floor he proceeded to never use.

Combeferre had been living with his parents in the suburbs, but the pull of Courfeyrac and Enjolras in the same place--rent-free--had drawn him in. Someone had to keep them all in line after all. Feuilly had the third floor and Bahorel stayed across the hall when he was in town. It was too far from where Joly was doing his residency, but Bossuet had taken over what was nominally Grantaire’s room, which meant that Joly and Musichetta were halfway moved in. Cosette and Eponine were staying with Valjean while Eponine’s siblings were still in school, but they did have a set of matching toothbrushes in the second floor bathroom, and some age appropriate games in the basement. Grantaire had picked up a foosball table at a garage sale and if you heard unlawfully spinning plastic men, you knew Gavroche was around. General basement screaming also could mean a foosball tournament was on, or that someone had turned on CNN, or that there was another spider incident. 

They didn’t have many house rules, at least for now. Each person would put in what they could for the tax bill on the property, and the utilities, and Marius’ inheritance covered the rest. It was a fund entitled “For the House,” meaning that it couldn’t be spent on any frivolity, such as law school or food. The money wasn’t really for Marius, it was as if Gillenormand just needed a human Cogsworth to watch over things after he was dead. To the Amis, it didn’t matter that they weren’t allowed to knock down any walls. They installed wifi and proceeded to use the space to spite everything its previous owner stood for. Well they used it _for_ justice and transformational change and self-care. The spite was an added bonus, at least for Enjolras. 

Having their own space was brilliant. Not having to rely on the Musain meant that they weren’t getting kicked out at 11:00pm or bothering paying customers. The former family room that faced the yard was the perfect size to have all their chairs in a circle when they needed to have an ABC meeting. 

The kitchen had tons of flat surfaces for working on posters or cataloging petitions. Even in the summer, the big kitchen smelled of hot chocolate. Now that it was December, a pot was normally brewing, but the embedded nature of the smell had more likely come from an incident of Marius and Bossuet colliding with a banana, an air vent, and a giant sneeze train. The big kitchen also came with a catering-size coffee maker, the decaf side of which had never been used under their tenure. The cabinet next to the fridge was supposed to house everyone’s personal mug, but it tended only to house Bossuet’s spares unless Joly needed to stress clean. 

Enjolras’ favorite part of the house was the library. Not because of the books--although their combined collections were getting close to outnumbering the pristine leatherbound matching sets of the previous inhabitant. It was the coziness. (Okay, well the books helped too.) But as each of them had moved in, the room had filled with futons and slightly hazardous recliners that didn’t fit elsewhere in the house. The window facing the street had a bench built into it where Jehan liked to write, and a collection of mismatched pillows tumbled down from it, a gentle avalanche. Often the furniture was snubbed in favor of a cuddle puddle. Though Enjolras wasn’t often the instigator, the “yes” came a lot more easily these days for him. He wasn’t convinced that Bossuet’s technique of punching the dust out of the pillows was an effective cleaning technique, but it certainly had saved him the day of the last CPS announcement.

When he got home, sometimes in the early afternoon, sometimes after the 11 bus had already gone to bed, he would go straight to the library and there would always be a smiling face or two or six to welcome him home--sometimes after throwing a cushion at him for staying out so late. Which honestly was fine when it was Courfeyrac but six on one wasn’t playing fair.

Indivisible met Wednesdays at noon in Andersonville, Amnesty in the loop Thursday nights. There were campus groups to mentor and ABC campaigns to organize and terrible articles to copyedit on the side to fund his coffee habit and health insurance. And there was Grantaire, cooking for the group most nights, contributing to the cause in the way that brought him peace. And by God did they all need some peace.

There was no talk of politics or strategy at the dinner table, chef’s rules. They could save that for the Situation Room, previously the formal dining room, which was saved for serious meetings and guests they needed to intimidate. Meals were for nourishment. Friends were nourishing, talk of the Illinois General Assembly was not. Enjolras had previously argued that smacking him with a spatula was not nourishing or hygienic, Mssr. Chef, but not even Joly had taken his side on that one. Something about how ‘even if Congress won’t follow its own rules, we will abide by ours in this household young man.’ 

Tonight he was sprawled out on the pillows in the library, with Grantaire on one side of him and Courf on the other. He’d propped up an old copy of Fromm’s _The Art of Loving_ on Courfeyrac’s lap, writing in instructions for early voting on a postcard heading to a household with a special election in Georgia. Grantaire was drawing kittens with little “VOTE” protest signs on the fronts of blank cards, before passing them off to those with better handwriting and the patience to write the same statistics and candidate values over and over again. Gavroche was tucked in the window seat placing the stamps and adding the occasional squiggly flair with markers. If a few cats ended up with moustaches, it just gave them a bit more character.

Every meeting he sat through, every march he slogged through, Enjolras came away thinking, “This is not okay. This is not going to be okay.” And he’d get on the train and think some more, sometimes making plans, sometimes just stewing. But then he would climb up the stairs, open the door, and hear the laughter and Grantaire’s awful music coming from the kitchen. He’d collapse on Combeferre or crawl into Feuilly’s latest elaborate blanket fort, and be reminded that he could not do everything, let alone single-handedly fix anything--not with a speech, or a law, or a protest. But, he could be here with them. In the swamp and the streets and the hard-won victories and the puddles. And at dinner, where his seat was open and coffee already poured. And so he’d set down his chisel and let go of the iceberg for now, in order to pick it up the next day.

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Courfeyrac named the house Bernice, but Enjolras refuses to acknowledge this. 
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Reader, if you're reading this now, I hope it lifts your spirits a bit. If you're reading this down the road, I hope things have gotten better.
> 
>  
> 
> PostcardstoVoters.org is a thing in the US! Check it out!


End file.
